This project, evolving the Internet to address new threats, accommodating emerging applications and technologies, and fostering the spread of the network throughout the physical world, aims at developing a Virtualized Network Infrastructure (ViNI) responding to the many challenges faced by today's Internet. In 25 years, the Internet has moved from an obscure research facility, to a critical piece of the national communication infrastructure. To appreciate the significance of this transformation, recall that a bug in the Internet' core routing algorithm inconvenienced several thousands in 1989 and the SQL slammer attack in 2003 grounded commercial airline flights, brought down thousands of ATM machines, and caused damages of approximately $1 billion dollars. As our dependence on the Internet grows, so do both risks and opportunities. Hence, it is imperative that we address new threats, accommodate emerging applications and technologies, and foster the spread of the network throughout the physical work, precisely the goals addressed by this work. The instrument must meet the following requirements. ViNI must
-Provide realism through an experimental environment that reflects closely real-world conditions. -Experiments must have access to realistic network topologies, high-speed forwaring engines, real users, and high volumes of real traffic, and dedicated link bandwidth and node resources (CPU, memory, disk) allocated on relatively small time scales. -Give experimenters control over their experiments by making it possible to replicate specific conditions for study. Researchers need tools to easily specify and start experiments, and to inject network events (e.g., failures, packet loss) in a predictable fashion. -Be shared among multiple simultaneous experiments running on the same hardware. PlanetLab, the starting point of ViNI, supports multiple simultaneous experiments by running each in a virtual machine and its virtualization needs to be extended to support the goals and requirements of ViNI. Moreover, new resources, such as IP address blocks, must be globally managed.
Hence, to address the challenges that face the Internet today, this experimental infrastructure must reconcile these non-orthogonal requirements to maximize the value of the enabled networking research. ViNI is envisioned serving as a microcosm for the next generation Internet.
